Before full darkness fell over the countryside that blipped slowly past them, Adeline wrapped the baby in gauze Decker had left for them to redress Rese’s wounds. Marie’s sons, Rutger and Hans, began to stir and squawk in their basket.

Marie asked her and Malia to clean Rese as best they could with the last of the water in a bucket while making sure to keep her bandages dry.

“We don’t want gangrene,” she said as she sat and lifted the first of her boys to her breast.

Adeline marveled at Marie’s stamina. Her cousin was shorter and lighter than Adeline, and yet she seemed so much bigger and certainly strong enough to produce milk for two babies at once.

Malia hung a lit lantern in the doorway of the train, just out of the wind, and began wiping and daubing Rese’s lower body with a wet cloth. “Marie, tell us about your husband, the surgeon.”

Adeline had corresponded with Marie several times a year, knew parts of the story, and wanted to spare her torment. “Malia, maybe there are better things to talk about,” she began.

“It’s all right, Adella,” Marie said. “The Soviets tried to take Klaus when their army left Ukraine in July 1941, but he managed to hide long enough to be taken instead by the Wehrmacht a year after the Germans invaded.”

Marie had been working for Dr. Klaus Werner for nearly two years by then, and he’d taught her enough that she had become useful to him in surgery.

“I was in love with him, but he did not seem to notice,” Marie said, taking one boy off her left breast and putting the other baby on the right. “He was twelve years older than me. When the Germans discovered his surgical skills, they drafted him. I wanted to go with him but was told to go help on my family’s lands. Klaus said he would write to me and left.”

Heartbroken and anxious, Marie waited for months to hear from the surgeon. Then two letters arrived at once in early December, both describing his life at a military hospital south of Stalingrad: the endless casualties, the long, hellish hours trying to save men torn apart by war, and the bleak conditions in which he lived.

“At the end of the second letter, he said he missed me,” Marie said, glowing in the lantern light. “He said he missed my smile and the sound of my voice.”

“You must have been so happy!” Malia said.

“Joyous,” Marie said. “I didn’t hear from him again until he knocked at my door on March 24 last year. He’d been given a month’s leave from the front and immediately got down on one knee and asked me to marry him.”

Malia clapped. “This is so romantic! You said yes!”

“I said yes, and we married the very next day,” she said. “I could not have been happier. He had come back the Klaus I knew and loved, more tender than I could have imagined, along with another Klaus I did not recognize: a stranger, haunted by everything he’d survived, a doctor terrified of going back to the war.”

She paused, cleared her throat, and went on. “But we experienced true love. That month together I’ll cherish forever. We made these beautiful little boys before he left.”

The baby pulled off her breast and coughed. Marie lifted him to her shoulder and patted him on the back until he burped. Malia finished cleaning Rese and covered her, felt her brow for fever, while smiling and looking expectantly at Marie to finish the story.

“Does he just love them?” Malia asked.

Marie’s face fell. “I’ve heard from Klaus only once since he went back, last November, before the babies were born, before the Dnieper River fell and we needed to run.”

“I’m sure he’s just behind us somewhere,” Malia said.

Her cousin said nothing for a moment. But then her face rippled with fear and pain as she choked, “That’s what I’m afraid of. He’s behind me somewhere. Not with me and our sons. Maybe for good.”

During an hour’s scheduled stop near the Czech town of Cervenik, Emil got a shovel from the engineers and, together with Johann and Adeline, went well off the track with a lantern. They dug a hole and placed the dead baby wrapped in gauze inside. They said a prayer and covered him up.

“Thank you,” Johann said to Emil. “I am sorry your mother said those things. I’m sorrier I said those things.”

“It’s okay, Papa,” Emil said, and patted him on the back. “It was a horrible day for everyone, even Mother.”

His father sighed, nodded, and trudged toward the silhouette of the train.

Adeline fell into Emil’s arms.

“I still miss our little one,” she said.

“We will always miss him,” he said. “He was our firstborn.”

As they walked back up the slope toward the waiting train, Adeline recalled what caused Johann to explode in rage. It was literally the first time she’d ever seen Emil’s father angry.

“I’ve seen your mother like that only one other time,” she said. “When she drank the cream to cut out my heart before the first Waldemar died. Cold. Heartless. Evil inside, like your father said.”

“And she hasn’t said a word since he blasted her?”

“Not a peep.”

“Well, that has to be a first in her entire life,” he said, and laughed, which made Adeline laugh and then hug him.

“I love that you can turn my spirits,” she said. “You’re a good husband, a good father, and a very good man, Emil Martel.”

Adeline had hoped her husband would take her words as genuine praise, but Emil’s face clouded briefly before he managed to smile at her in the lantern light. “And you are the finest woman I have ever known. I’ll sit with Rese first if you want. Let you get some sleep.”

Adeline studied him a long moment, thinking again that there were parts of Emil that were still a mystery to her and might always be so. They went up the short slope to the train where they met Sergeant Decker leaving the boxcar after giving Rese a full dose of morphine, enough to hold her through the night.

“When will she wake up?”

“I would think tomorrow,” Decker said, and left.

They managed to lift Rese and the stretcher high enough to get their bedding from the wagons below. Emil carried it all to the roof of the boxcar where they found the boys curled up together sleeping, their safety ropes still tied around their waists.

He helped Adeline to get the blankets over and around their sons before doing the same for her. “Don’t untie the rope unless the train is stopped,” he whispered. “I’ll wake you up when it’s your time to watch over her.”

He moved toward the ladder with the lantern.

“Emil,” she whispered sharp enough to turn him. “I love you. And thank you.”

Her husband looked at her as if she were speaking another language, but then nodded. “I love you, too. And you are welcome. I guess.”

Emil started down the ladder before she could reply. Eyes closed, she lay there, thinking about him before images and sounds of Rese began to appear in her mind: Rese vomiting on the way to the train station; Rese coming up out of the lake water, screaming with delight, so wild and free; Rese falling onto the tracks; Rese screaming when Decker cauterized her stumps.

More and faster images flashed as she fought for sleep: Marie delivering Rese’s stillborn son and Adeline holding him, a miracle ended, so tiny and so sad and precious; she wanted to cry at how dizzy and beaten down she felt now atop the train, displaced, a refugee of war with no place to call home other than the one she’d conjured from a painting in a book.

Was it only this morning we left Budapest? Adeline thought as she drifted to sleep. How can so much hope and tragedy be packed into one day?

Emil woke her in the darkness before dawn as they passed through the Czech town of Puchov. The boys still slept. The train rolled at a walking pace.

“How is she?” Adeline whispered as she got out from under her blankets.

“A few nightmares, but she slept through it,” he said.

“Your mother?”

“You mean the Sphinx?”

Even though she’d only just awoken, Adeline couldn’t help but laugh again at the idea of Karoline still not talking. She kissed his cheek after he got beneath the blankets and then climbed down the ladder. Johann was waiting to help her over to the open door of the boxcar.

She thanked him and scooted by Marie and her twins sleeping on the floor and went to Rese’s side. Putting her hand on her sister-in-law’s head, she found it warm but not feverish. She used the lantern to inspect the bandages, which were just soaking through. In the first good light, she’d help her cousin change them.

As Adeline hung the lantern back on its hook, she noticed Rese move, not with a jerk of pain, but a stirring, her shoulders shifting, her jaw going slack and then swallowing before her eyelids fluttered open. Rese’s eyes rolled as if she could not focus them. She swallowed, closed her eyes, and then opened them again, wobbling before they settled shakily on Adeline.

“Where am I?” she rasped.

Adeline took her young sister-in-law’s hand in her own and murmured, “You’re alive, Rese. You had a bad accident, but you’re alive.”